Timing is everything in sales, but knowing the right moment to reach out can be a difficult task.
Sales teams often miss opportunities simply because they aren’t able to pinpoint when prospects are most likely to engage.
Add to that the overwhelming task of managing manual cold email campaigns, ensuring deliverability, and avoiding the dreaded spam folder—it’s a challenge every sales leader knows all too well.
That’s where Hugo Millington-Drake, CEO and co-founder of Trigify, comes in. Trigify is a SaaS platform that helps businesses identify key sales triggers to engage prospects at the right moment.
Despite Trigify’s ability to help sales teams identify key moments to engage with prospects, Hugo’s team still encountered the same outreach hurdles many others face: manual cold emailing, deliverability issues, and the ongoing struggle to avoid spam folders.
That’s when they turned to Smartlead to simplify and scale their email outreach.
Let’s dive into their journey to learn more.
Trigify is a cutting-edge SaaS platform focused on identifying sales triggers, co-founded by Hugo Millington-Drake, who serves as the company's CEO as well.
Trigify helps businesses pinpoint the best times to reach out to potential leads by tracking market events that could signal ideal engagement opportunities.
The platform covers both traditional and innovative triggers.
On the conventional side, it tracks indicators like job postings and company news. What truly sets Trigify apart, however, is its social signals feature. Leveraging LinkedIn engagement, this feature analyzes the types of posts and content that users interact with, building detailed profiles that help sales teams reach out with greater precision.
Hugo and his team didn’t start in the SaaS world right away.
Trigify originally launched as an agency, specializing in custom workflows for individual clients. However, the team eventually transitioned into a full SaaS model, serving a wider array of businesses.
Trigify’s core clientele has historically included sales teams from software startups and recruitment firms, usually ranging from solo operators to teams of up to 50 people. However, with the introduction of social signals, Trigify has also found value in marketing teams. By tracking engagement across social media, the platform helps clients attribute engagement to conversions like website visits or demo requests.
Hugo highlights the pivotal role of Smartlead as a key tool for both Trigify’s agency and SaaS operations.
Most of Trigify’s customers also use Smartlead, making the platforms highly interconnected, particularly when it comes to managing outreach.
Before integrating Smartlead, Hugo Millington Drake and the Trigify team faced two major challenges with their email outreach campaigns:
Conducting cold email outreach manually was incredibly labor-intensive. The team struggled with the constant need to follow up, track replies, and maintain consistency, leading to a scattered approach. It required an immense amount of time and effort to manage each step, making it difficult to scale outreach efforts efficiently.
Hugo initially managed campaigns by sending large volumes of emails from a single domain without much focus on deliverability. This resulted in a high percentage of emails landing in spam folders, severely limiting their effectiveness. The lack of proper deliverability management meant low engagement and fewer replies, hindering their ability to generate leads.
These challenges were common, but they hindered Trigify from reaching its full potential in terms of scaling outreach and maximizing lead generation.
Smartlead offered Trigify the solution to both time and deliverability challenges:
Smartlead streamlined the entire cold email process. With the ability to set up campaigns in minutes, inject spintax for personalization, and automate follow-ups, Trigify could move from a tedious manual process to a more efficient, automated workflow. This freed up significant time for Hugo and his team, allowing them to focus on other high-value tasks.
Smartlead's features helped Trigify ensure that their emails reached the inbox rather than the spam folder. The tool’s simple UI allowed them to handle email warm-ups and deliverability settings, improving their campaigns' effectiveness. By leveraging Smartlead’s ability to manage multiple domains and reduce harmful open rates, Trigify improved deliverability rates substantially.
With Smartlead, Trigify was able to scale their cold email outreach with ease. The integration with their workflows allowed for the creation of evergreen campaigns, where leads could be seamlessly imported into Smartlead and run in the background. This integration proved invaluable as Trigify moved towards more automated and scalable processes.
The integration of Smartlead had a dramatic impact on Trigify's operations and growth:
Within just six months of using Smartlead, Trigify grew their outreach from zero to 30,000 emails sent per month, solely relying on email for outbound marketing.
“When we started our agency, we started with Smartlead on cold email, and we got that from zero to 30,000 a month in six months. And that was solely from sending emails from Smartlead.” - Hugo Millington Drake
This scale of operation was unthinkable before Smartlead, as the manual process had capped their potential.
One standout campaign, which targeted over 3,000 contacts, achieved a 25% reply rate, with 38% of those replies being positive. This is an exceptional conversion rate, demonstrating the power of Smartlead in helping Trigify connect with their target audience effectively.
Trigify’s clients also benefited from Smartlead’s capabilities, with many of them using it for their own outreach. The integration between Trigify’s platform and Smartlead made it easy for clients to use both tools simultaneously, streamlining their sales efforts.
Looking forward, Hugo and the Trigify team are keen to deepen their partnership with Smartlead.
Hugo mentioned the potential of further improving campaign management, especially around domain setup, which can be complex for new users. He expressed interest in seeing Smartlead expand its offerings to make email outreach even simpler for beginners, potentially by automating some of the more technical aspects like domain configuration.
Additionally, Hugo is curious about Smartlead’s roadmap and its vision for the future.
While email will undoubtedly remain the core focus, Hugo wonders whether the platform might expand into other areas, such as LinkedIn outreach, which could open new doors for even more integrated outreach strategies.
Trigify's journey from a manual, time-consuming process to an efficient, scalable outreach operation is a testament to the power of Smartlead.
By addressing the core challenges of time management and deliverability, Smartlead has enabled Hugo and his team to not only scale their business but also improve the quality of their campaigns. For anyone looking to streamline their outreach and boost their lead generation, Smartlead is a game-changer.
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Founder, StackOptimise
Smartlead's combination of automation, unlimited inboxes, and easy campaign management has completely transformed how we run cold email campaigns.
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Founder, Cold Email Hackers
We have about 15 companies and we use Smartlead for all of them.
Founder, DutchSave Media
One of the things I love about using Smartlead is the deliverability feature. If they landed in the bounce or spam folders, we could resolve this quickly.
Co-Founder, Growth Today
I want to continue to use Smartlead to make operations more seamless - the plan is to bring more clients here and build more SOPs.
Founder, FueltoFly
Smartlead listens to the agencies and customers and builds according to what people want, that has really made things easier for us.
Founder, OutboundSync
We build an infrastructure product, and OutboundSync communicates with Smartlead itself. I love the webhook and API. They're really well done and keep getting better.
Founder, Axoleads
With SmartDelivery, you can put all of that in the hands of the tool. It ensures your emails land in inboxes, and by running a simple test, you can see if you're hitting the mark.
Founder, Claygen
Deliverability is the cornerstone of cold email outreach. You could have the best email copy in the world, but if no one is seeing it, it's useless. I really love the feature where you can actually give client accesses to your clients.
Co-Founder, Cymate
I do not want to switch to another software. Pick a solution you trust, stick with it, and keep refining your copy.
CMO, Avalanche Capital
Managing large volumes of emails through multiple inboxes used to be a logistical nightmare. With Smartlead, the process is seamless. We book thousands of discovery calls through cold emails. These campaigns are generating leads at a scale we never thought possible.
Founder, Growth Engine X
We came for the unlimited inboxes, and we stayed for the API. 1.5M cold emails/month, 7,767+ inboxes managed.
Head of Community & Ecosystem, TxtCart
You cannot replace having 10,000 touches with potential clients. When you have that much distribution and reach, you really start to see incredible results. The simplicity of Smartlead made all the difference. It doesn't require you to be a technical wizard.
Founder, Hyperke
Smartlead has been a game-changer for us. It increased our appointment volume, improved ease of use, and offered valuable features. 80% increase in appointments/month, peak of 276 appointments in a single month.
Founder, Kinetyca
Smartlead has been our cold email backbone from day one. The platform evolves constantly, keeping pace with how deliverability and personalization need to work today. 21% overall reply rate, $175K in 4 months for multiple B2B clients.
Founder, Reachflow
Smartlead is centered around deliverability and constantly evolving. Their API is not like any other platform. Smartlead covers all our needs. The focus on core features like deliverability and API integration is unmatched.
CEO, Halfwarm
Our approach to crafting conversational emails led to reply rates that many of my peers thought were unattainable.
Co-Founder, letstrike
We've grown on zero capital, zero marketing, purely cold emailing - and that's the story we love to tell. The best approach is no approach if you can't handle domain meltdown. The second best is something like Smartlead that's built from the ground up for deliverability at scale.
Founder, Fenixtal
Smartlead's white-labeling and automation let us punch above our weight. The 12M euros sales potential? That's what happens when you combine human creativity with Smartlead's precision.
Co-Founder, Digital Creativs
Nine out of 10. Ninety percent of our clients are on Smartlead unless they come in with an existing setup. That's the default.
Co-Founder, BuildingReach
At the end of the day, you have to take a bet on one tool or another. It was a no-brainer taking that bet on Smartlead. We had to even turn down the volume of our marketing campaigns - Smartlead was capable of driving more volume than our sales team was able to fulfill.
Founder & MD, Prospectiv
Since starting the business in January of this year, we've already generated $200K in sales exclusively from cold email. Smartlead has been central to our operations and has exceeded our expectations.
Founder, Growthlynk
There's so much stuff built on top of it. I would be dead if I had to rebuild it with another tool. I can manage hundreds of senders easily. I can send hundreds of thousands of emails.
Founder, Corebits
The platform's HubSpot integration, real-time Slack updates, and advanced campaign customization have been game changers for our business and our clients'.
Founder, Apex Ascension
From day one, we've never used anything else.
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